Metempsychosis
by Mirthful-Malady
Summary: Metempsychosis: transmigration of the soul, esp. its reincarnation after death. A person dies in one world. In another, Sayu Yagami is born with memories of another life, and is haunted by knowledge of things she shouldn't know. It's just a matter of time before it drives her mad. OC self-insert. Dark.
1. Samsara

She knows herself as Sayu, remembers living a childhood as Sayu, and knows that she loves her brother Light more than anything else in the world.

But she also remembers another life, where she knew herself by another name, remembers living another childhood; a life where she loved no one.

She doesn't know if she is this other person, somehow living in Sayu's body with these stolen memories, or if she is Sayu with memories of this other person's life.

But, she thinks, it doesn't really matter, because she's here now. With Light.

* * *

She remembers a story, from this other life, with a character who had her brother's name and the borrowed power of a god of death. She thinks this should bother her, but it doesn't. She knows she could never hate Light.

* * *

There is a dark madness within her brother, she can see it even now, years before he find the Shinigami's cursed book. She loves him anyway.

* * *

Sometime she looks in the mirror and remembers when she was someone else, watching an older Sayu as she lived, unaware of her brother's growing madness.

* * *

She has nightmares, sometimes, of maniacal laughter and red eyes. Then redredredred of her brothers blood as his eyes gleam with madness and his body is riddled with bullets. A boy who seems to be cut from paper, with eyes like drops of ink. He's blank, so very blank and cold like snow, but nowhere near as beautiful. He's dangerous, and she knows that he is the reason that she dreams of her brother's cooling corpse, his face a rigid mask of mindless rage as his hair soaks up the crimson background of his own coagulating blood. His hair is mussed, in a chaotic disarray that Light had never allowed it to fall into in life. She thinks this bothers her even more than all the red of his blood. Because he isn't perfect in death, and that body isn't him anymore. She thinks she hates that corpse even more than she hates the cold pale boy made of paper.

* * *

It's blurry, and vague, this other life she remembers living. She thinks she had friends, and she knows she had family, but she can't remember their names, or their faces. She can't remember her own name either, or what she looked liked. She thinks she had black hair, short and spiked with cheap gell that smelled of plastic. But that's it. She tries to be bothered by this; these people were important to her, she tells herself, but in the end it's just so terribly hard to care. She has Light, after all. That's all she's ever needed.

_A/N: so I decided to start another. This first chapter is really just some drabbles. I might make it into an actual story later, though._


	2. Awaken, Sleeper

There is something infinitely frightening about the moment when she crosses the boundary between sleep and wakefulness. That single gasping moment when her mind is simultaneously lunging towards wakefulness and desperately grasping at the last remaining strands of cobwebbed dreams. It's almost like dying, every time she wakes, because she knows that she feels like someone else in her dream. She can almost feel the sun of her dreams on her skin, she knows she went places inside them, talked to people who were but only figments of her own mind. There is something inside her dreams that calls to her, and while she dreams she feels complete, but when she wakes all she has is that terrible mocking memory of completeness.

It's jarring, this sense of loss she feels when she wakes up each morning with forgotten dreams. It is an effect without a cause. It's terribly frustrating, just like having a word on the tip of her tongue but never quite being able to remember it. She tries not to let it bother her, she really does, but she can't quite forget that terrible emptiness like an open gaping wound inside her mind. It's a desperate clawing longing made so many times worse by the fact that she doesn't know what she so longs for. Sometimes she wakes up crying and she doesn't really know why, and all she can do is let the warm tears drip down her face as she stares into the darkness of her room, and hope that the inexplicable sadness will pass before she has to pretend to wake up to get ready for school.

She is very good at pretending. She has to be. She tried to talk to her mother about the dreams once. Her mother had the strangest look in her eyes, she thinks it was worry, then. She didn't like that look, not at all. So she told her mother that the dreams and the horrible emptiness had gone away. So she pretends, pretends that she isn't afraid of going to sleep at night. Pretends that the she's the normal, cute, oblivious little girl that her mother expects her to be.

She doesn't even consider telling her father. He's a busy man, a policeman, and he's rarely home anyway. When he is home, she only ever receives the barest acknowledgement from her father. You're so cute, Sayu. He always says with a vague smile, as his eyes are thinking of something else. He never really sees her, doesn't see the need to take a moment and really look. But that's okay. She knows she's not really special, not compared to her older brother.

Her perfect brother, always neatly groomed and intelligent and whose room was always as obsessively organized as his own brilliant mind. He's their father's pride and joy, and their father always tries to spend time with him, whenever he's home. She used to be jealous when she was much, much younger and still wanted her father's regard, but she sees now that it was foolish of her. Her brother doesn't really want or need their father's approval, or his warm pride, even with how freely given it is. She sees how fake the smile that he gives their father is, each time he comes home. How carefully manufactured each of his conversations with him are. She doesn't know if he's aware of just how deeply ingrained this mask of his is, or if he realises it's even there. She admires his skill, unknowing or not.

* * *

She's never been truly close with her brother, despite appearances. He's always acted as the perfect older brother, but it's just that; an act. But she watches him; catalogues his every movement, every habit and nervous tic. She thinks that if Light were another person, she would know him better than himself. But he isn't another person, he's Light, and his mind will always be beyond her own meagre comprehension. She can read him, to an extent, but she doesn't think that she'll ever truly know him. Part of her doesn't really want to, because she knows that even beginning to think that she knows him would be the greatest folly of thinks it's only fair really, because he will never really know her either.

She doesn't think anyone will. The only difference is that everyone else will make the mistake she's avoided-they'll all think that they know her.

_A/N: More little drabbley bits. I just love exploring a different Sayu._


	3. Something's Wrong

Light Yagami is a wonderfully and extraordinarily brilliant child. He knows this not only because he is also extraordinarily self-aware, but because every adult he has ever come into contact with has found it necessary to verbalize the fact. They appeared to take some sort of inexplicable glee in exclaiming in overly sweet and impressed tones about his utter brilliance. It speaks of their intelligence that they still said it condescendingly despite being aware of his capacity to understand the sentiment behind condescension. Needless to say he found the majority of adults rather vexing, and despite their efforts none of them had really endeared themselves to him. Even his father.

Soichiro Yagami was a hardworking man, a good husband, and probably fancied himself a wonderful father as well. Light found it in his best interests to humour the man in his delusions, seeing as there really wasn't much he could do about it. He knows that the man loves him, as well as his mother and Sayu. This means very little to him seeing as he does not really understand the value of the emotion, outside of an evolutionary perspective.

Light knows that there is something wrong with his sister. He knows that she is exceptionally aware for a child her age, and he also knows that none of the adults have noticed anything out of the ordinary about her. She's very good at hiding whatever it is. But Light knows. He notices the little things, the barely there dark circles under her eyes and the strangely intense way he can sometime feel her watching him. He knows that she thinks that he hasn't noticed, but he isn't blind, nor is he stupid. Sometimes he catches her watching him, in that way young children watch something particularly fascinating. But there is always something in her eyes, something dark that he can't quite place. Sayu is intelligent. Possibly almost as intelligent as himself. But there's something about her that always niggles at the very back of his mind, telling him that there's something wrong with her. He doesn't know what it is. And he hates not knowing.

Despite being her older brother he's never really been very close to her. He supposes it is normal, considering the differences in gender and the age gap, which was considerable in relation to their youth. Even still, he finds himself fond of her. It is a strange sentiment for him, but he finds himself strangely content with it, despite its strangeness.

_A/N: Writing Light is horribly difficult. Mine is probably OOC, but really he's still a child, maybe nine or ten, and Sayu is about six._


	4. Skin Hunger

Sayu is eight when she begins to remember her dreams. She isn't sure how to feel about it, after the fact. Most of it seems fragmented, confusing. But she thinks she feels a little bit more whole, as she remembers the blurry details of her dream. The terrible numbing hollowness which naws at her mind seems to recede by the tiniest portion. She can't help but want to feel more of that relief, now that she's experienced it.

She was older, in her dream. Older than Light, even, with the body of an adult and a mind to match. She remembers thinking things that make no sense to her awake. She was in a school at first ,or a library, she thinks. Then a place with flickering lights and the acrid smell of ashes and burning flesh. There were people who seemed strangely familiar to her, who she laughed and talked to even though she couldn't remember their names. She knows that those people would never be her friends, even if they existed outside her dreams. They seemed like paper cut-outs to her, all pulp and one-dimensional lines, just real enough to exist as backdrops to her dream. But there was one girl, tall and lithe like a tree spirit peeled from the pages of an ancient myth, with bronze skin and golden eyes. Sayu remembers the smoothness of the girls skin beneath her hand, the sweet smell of her dark hair and the husky sound of her voice in Sayu's ear. It was hot, in her dream, as if the entire world was a sauna filled with light and heavy steam.

She can recall the eyes of the faceless people, and their voices whispering like dead leaves in a brisk october wind, but she discards them. They were never important. Not like the girl. She knows that she felt nothing for this girl, other than a strange burning desire beneath her skin, the memory of which seems decidedly foreign to her eight year old body. But her eyes, golden and sharp like the edge of a broken mirror, follow her into the waking world, and send her to distraction. There is something infinitely attractive about those eyes, but it wasn't the girl. She had used the girl, she knows this, just as the girl had used her. She knows what she did in the dream, she's known about sex and the carnal pleasures that adults try so terribly hard to shield the feeble minds of children from. As she is, she doesn't really understand the draw of such acts, even if she did in her dreams. She wanted those eyes. Those cold, beautiful eyes that she knows belong in the face of another.

It is hard to reconcile these dream-thoughts with her waking ones. They have such different flavours, and it's terribly confusing at times. But in the end she supposes it doesn't really matter which ones are which, because they are all ultimately hers.

* * *

After that first remembered dream Sayu started sleeping more. The easing of the hollowness inside her lessened with each dream, and it was addicting. So she dreamed as much as possible. She slept in class, when she could, but made sure that her grades were average so that she would be left alone. She found it particularly amusing to make sure that her grades were the exact average of all of her classmates grades.

She doesn't have any friends, not really. But there's a group of particularly giggly girls who have decided that she is one of them. They're cute, and mostly harmless,so she lets them do as they like as long as they let her sleep. Her mother is quite pleased that she's 'made friends' and beams at her each day that she comes home with beads and ribbons braided into her hair by the girls while she was asleep. Sayu thinks that it is some sort of platonic bonding ritual among normal young girls, but she isn't sure because the other girls also had a habit of trying to make the boys pretty as well. Some of them actually looked quite nice, when the girls were done, Sayu admits to herself.

She's never actually bothered to learn their names. She doesn't really care enough to learn them, and she's never really put any stock in names to begin with. She hardly ever feels like a Sayu anymore, and its really only out of habit that she refers to herself as such. People are so much more than a few characters written on a sheet of paper, or a series of sounds. So she always knows _who _they are, even if she doesn't remember their names.

* * *

She likes to watch strangers ,when she isn't sleeping or watching her brother. She likes to find little nooks and crannies in the walls to sit and watch the flowing masses of men and women scurrying to and fro in business suits and casual wear. All those people, surrounded by other and yet they were all completely alone. She found them fascinating, how they ignored each other's existence, flowing like the receding tide around the people who did have someone.

No matter how much she logically knows that the people she watches are strangers, there is always one element of them that she finds familiar. A crease between the eyes,a dimple, or the color of their eyes. She feels like she knows all these people, down to the deepest, darkest part of their souls. But there's always something about them that's alien to her. Strange and cold and different. Maybe it's her. But they're always that way to her, unreal and flat no matter how much she feels she knows them, like the faceless cutouts that whisper in her dreams.

* * *

When she is nine she has a dream that makes her remember why she was afraid to sleep. She remembers nothing, not in that she cannot remember her dream, but that she dreamt of Nothing. She was surrounded by blackness, thick and strong and pressing in on her at all sides. It was quiet too, the loud kind of quiet that announces that you are all alone, and made her want to rip out her ears just so she wouldn't have to listen to it. She thinks she tried to scream, but she didn't have a voice, nor a body or hands to scratch and claw at the nothingness with. There was just her and the blackness, a bodiless mind drifting and screaming to herself.

Everytime she closes her eyes she remembers that cold darkness. She feels like she drifted there for an eternity, before she woke with a gasping breath and clenched her trembling arms to her body. That black nothingness is so much worse than the hollowness inside her. So she compromises, and approaches sleep each night with wary trepidation. She sleeps only enough to remain functional, most of her sleep made up of the naps in class, which are too brief and light for her to fall into dreams.

Light is thirteen, a first year Junior High student. He's so much busier now, with his schoolwork and friends and girls. She thinks this makes her sad, but she isn't really sure.

* * *

Some of the girls in her class hate her. She doesn't understand why, doesn't think she'll ever understand why, because their minds are so convoluted and illogical that she doesn't think that they'll ever possess any modicum of reason. She ignores them because she sees no reason to acknowledge their pointless accusations. But the girls that have claimed her as their friend are quick to defend her against the barbed taunts of the hate-filled girls. She appreciates their efforts, but finds it detrimental to her health in the long term.

Her house is not very far from the elementary school, so she usually walks home by herself. She's always been rather small,perhaps her lack of sleep has stunted her growth, and she's never been the most physically strong. So when they surround her on her way back home there is very little she can do against them.

She's almost impressed by how vicious they are. But, she's mostly annoyed by the cuts and the bruises that litter her body after they are done with her. She thinks her lip is bleeding, and she knows her eye will be black tomorrow, but nothing is broken or permanently damaging so she picks up her scattered books and continues home.


	5. Disappear

They still hate her-the girls. They hold on to their irrational hatred much like oysters hold to dark stone at the edge of a tide. She doesn't understand them. Knows she never will. But she doesn't really care, because she's found some satisfaction in knowing that no matter how many cuts or bruises that they give her, she will always win. They're scared of her, she can see it in their eyes even as they rain down blows upon her slender form. She never makes a single noise, even as they abuse her body so. Pain is easy to deal with. Pain is real, it grounds her. She remember pain so much greater than these paltry blows delivered by undeveloped limbs, pain that was all-consuming and burning beneath her skin like an unquenchable fire. She's silent still, and she knows that her unyielding gaze sparks some desperate, terrible fear within those girls even as she spits out blood and her split lip throbs. They're like animals, weak and mindless, and she enjoys the power she has over their minds even as her body is at their mercy. She will always win.

It's been a few weeks since its started. She knows that she could make them stop if she wanted to. It would be so terribly easy, a work of but a few moments and the click of a mouse to ruin their lives and drive them to madness. But she sees no reason to do so. What purpose would it serve, after all? The pain itself is no issue for her, it distracts her mind from the horrible gaping abyss that waits for her in her sleep. Her mother is easy to distract, hiding the wounds is literal child's play. Light is rarely home, busy with his perfect marks and perfect clothes and perfect friends.

She thinks she might enjoy the pain, the reprieve that it gives her from the unyielding blankness. Masochism, she knows it's called. And it's so terribly easy just to let them do the work for her, let them grant her relief even as they think to punish her. The pain keeps her from deep sleep, from dreaming, as the bruises twinge with every movement. She'd be ecstatic if she could remember how it was supposed to feel.

She's mad, most probably, but it doesn't bother her. It would serve no purpose to fret about something that she cannot change. She's different, inhuman in a way that only Light could come close to really understanding. Her mind is only human, and her dreams might have been so once as well, but the darkness, the Nothingness, is something else entirely. Some parasitic being latched onto her soul and visiting torment upon her. It might destroy her in the end, she knows this. She doesn't see how it matters. Part of her desperately wants someone to notice, but she buries that deeply.

* * *

Sometimes she watches her brother with his 'friends', and the girls that perpetually surround him. He's dated most of them, and she knows that he only does it because it's normal. He's a marvelous actor, a con-man, a puppeteer and the puppet. His imitation of humanity is perfect, beyond perfect, in fact, and no one notices. Except her of course, but she's just like him, isn't she? A monster in human skin?

She's good at hiding her nature, her madness, just as Light is skilled at hiding his.

So she pretends to be prey, and accepts the abuse with an implacable mask, and eyes that glint with darkness. She's begun to enjoy the metallic taste of blood on her tongue, and she wonders if the blood of another would be so deliciously sharp.

* * *

It takes a month of blood and bruises and hateful girls with eyes like cornered animals for Light to notice. There is no confrontation between the siblings. No declarations of brotherly protection, or soothing hands on open wounds. That's what his mask would have done, and he's much too fond of Sayu to play the puppet master for her. Instead, there is silence, and a dark glimmer in his eyes as he takes in the old and new bruises which mar her pale skin. And he turns away silently, as she finishes changing, and walks to his room, closing the door with a soft click that resonates in the silence.

Sayu recognizes that dark glimmer, the dangerous set of his shoulders and slight stiffening of his perfectly straight posture. She smiles faintly to herself, and begins to hum the tune to a half-forgotten melody from her dreams of ash and pain.

The next day three of the girls are missing. Family troubles, the teacher tells the class. There had been five of the hate-filled girls, and now there were only two. Their eyes are wide, their faces white with fear as they look at Sayu. She thinks they might be trembling.

It's the end of her pain at the hands of other, for now at least. Part of her is disappointed that she is to be denied relief in such a way, but a larger part of her fractured mind is quite pleased. Because Light noticed.


	6. Looking into the Abyss

She's in the park, the first time she feels the Void in another person's soul. She's always walked this way home from school, through the park filled with trees and too bright flowers. She thinks it's supposed to be soothing, this weak imitation of nature. She'd find it sad, if she actually cared. She's usually the only one there, around that time of day, so it's moderately surprising to find someone else. It's a woman, tall and lean, with a face that doesn't quite seem to fit her. The woman's clothes are baggy, and she wears a large black coat that her thin fingers clutch desperately at. There are slightly darker patches on the fabric that Sayu thinks might be bloodstains. She isn't beautiful, not even close and there's something about her that simply screams madness. Sayu probably shouldn't have approached the woman, but that painful draw of familiar darkness was far too tempting.

The woman is crouched down, next to the large flowers. She mutters to herself in English as she frantically rips them out. Yes, quite mad. But interesting.

So Sayu crouches beside the woman and watches as she claws at the roots of the plants with ripped and bloody nails. Still muttering.

She can feel the void inside this woman, driving her to madness. It's a different flavor than Sayu's own, but still familiar in an almost painful way. She wonders if this woman dreams of darkness and screaming and ashes as well.

Sayu is right next to the woman, close enough to smell the scent of cheap alcohol and death that lingers around her like the perfume of some horrible rotting flower. She asks the woman what her name is, but the woman gives no sign that she even knows that Sayu is there. Her eyes are wide, and glassy, as if the woman is in the grip of some horrible fever. They dart from side to side as her skeletal hand grasp at the stems of flowers, and spasm around them as if she's just holding herself back from choking them to death.

Sayu knows that there's no point trying to talk to the woman, she's too far gone for that. But there's something comforting (and terrifying, but it's hard for her to really feel fear of anything other than her dreams) about knowing that someone else has experienced the same horror as herself. So she just crouches there, next to the thin pale woman in the bloodstained coat and listens to the sound of roots being ripped from the mulch. Whenever the woman wrenches out a flower in a particularly vicious manner Sayu fancies that she can hear faint screams. Sayu leaves when it starts to get dark. It wouldn't do to worry her mother.

The woman is in the park again, the next day at the same time, and Sayu once again crouches down beside her, and watches out she starts ripping out a new bed of flowers. The flowers from the day before are all gone, and the mulch where they had been had been raked neatly over. It's hardly noticeable.

Sayu wonders if she'll end up like this woman, trapped in her nightmares even in her waking moments. She'd like to think that she is stronger than that, but she knows that there is no way to shield herself from the inexorable void. Humans, she thinks, aren't meant to remember such things. They must be horrible mistakes, the woman and herself, people who somehow slipped through the cracks of whatever system governed reincarnation, if that was indeed what had happened to them. They had seen whatever it was on the other side of death, looked into the abyss, if you will, and the abyss had done so much more to them than simply looking back. But she can hope, she supposes, that this woman crouched next to her in the dirt of the public park isn't simply mad, and really is afflicted by whatever she saw in the void. It is also possible, Sayu admits, that they are both simply mad and there is no void, no dark vastness that they floated in for so many eternities. But she'd rather not think on possibilities, so Sayu closes her eyes and concentrates on the feeling of familiar darkness coming from the woman, and listens to the ripping and snapping of the flowers' thin roots.

The flowers are yellow this time, her mother's favorite. So she picks through the pile of uprooted plants beside the woman for the most intact flowers, and fashions a bouquet of them after removing the roots. Her mother is very pleased with Sayu's gift, and places them in a crystal vase filled with water on the dining room table.

It takes a week for the woman to remove all the flowers in the park. Sayu does not spend the last day crouched next to the woman in the dirt, because by the time she arrives the woman is dead.

Sayu finds her next to a large pile of flowers, which seem to be all the flowers the woman had ripped out from the park. They are dry and brown, and the only color that Sayu can see on them is the dark red of the woman's blood. There's a mad smile on the woman's thin lips, made even more grotesque by the dark red tracks of blood that dribble down her chin. She doesn't see any wounds on the woman, but it seems as if she vomited the rather sizable pool of blood. The woman's eyes are wide open and glazed in death, their frantic darting finally stilled with no more invisible horrors for them to witness. If she had been the more poetic sort, Sayu would have called the scene darkly beautiful, or haunting, but she wasn't the more poetic sort. All she saw was a pale, empty corpse, a shell of bone and flesh which had, for a time, housed a soul even more broken than her own. The body as it is now holds no more interest for Sayu than the shriveled brown flowers beside it.

So after gazing at the shriveled remains of both woman and flower for a short time, she adjusts the strap of her dark blue school bag, turns around and walks back home.


End file.
